


Moonlighting

by Huggle



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Amnesiac Jim Gordon, Caring Harvey Bullock, Coercion, Evil Fish Mooney, Gen, Harvey Rescues Jim, Hurt Jim Gordon, Protective Harvey Bullock, Vulnerable Jim Gordon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:08:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25319566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huggle/pseuds/Huggle
Summary: Jim is missing, and Harvey is going out of his mind until a tip off from Penguin reveals the location of his missing partner.Meanwhile, a man with no memory of who he is stumbles into Fish Mooney’s bar, proving to her that good things do come to those who wait.
Relationships: Harvey Bullock & Jim Gordon
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Moonlighting

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn’t sure how to tag for it, but there is a very brief scene in this story where Fish decides to corrupt Jim by getting someone to train him how to be a ‘host’ in her bar.
> 
> It’s never clearly stated what Fish’s intentions are for him, but Jim can read where the guy’s headed, and he is vulnerable but still able to defend himself, so nothing happens, but the threat is there.

He wakes up slow, body aching, head feeling like somebody whacked him with a brick.

Trying to get up just shows what a mess he is; he ends up flopping over the edge of whatever he’s lying on, and the floor is hard and ready to meet him, and then he hurts even worse.

“Oh, my. My, my. So eager to leave us, aren’t you?”

He pushes himself up, vision a little blurry, and looks up at the source of the voice.

There’s a woman standing over him, a coldness in her gaze, and three big guys standing behind her.

Even muddled as his head is, he has a feeling he should be eager to leave them.

But he can’t even stand.

“Please,” he says. “Can you help me? I’m….”

He trails off, words stalling. He’s…. He takes a sharp breath at the sudden panic swelling in his chest. It was there, what he was about to say.

Who he was, and yet now it’s gone.

The woman smiles at him, but it offers no comfort. “You’re…. You’re what?”

Like she’s expecting something.

“I don’t know,” he has to admit. “I don’t know my name. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

She’s on him like a hungry lioness, grabbing the back of his neck, holding him still so she can look at him.

He wants to pull away, but all his strength is being used in holding himself up and even then his arms are shaking.

And yet, there’s a fire in him, muted, let to burn low, that seems to insist he would never let himself be handled like this. That he can stop it.

He can’t.

When she leans back, she seems satisfied. And excited.

“Well. My poor, poor dear. Of course we’ll help you. We’ll take care of you here.”

“Boss.” The big guy standing right behind her is shaking his head. “You really think this is a good idea?”

She pets his head gently, something reassuring in her touch, even if he feels like it’s a tactile lie. Still, he’s scared and he hurts and so he lets himself push into it and she laughs.

It’s like the tinkle of breaking glass.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” she says. “Butch, where is your Christian charity?”

He mutters something, then nods to the two guys behind him. “Help him up,” he says. “And call Doc Clancy over.”

They’re actually going to help him.

The woman turns back to him, and he can’t help it, has to know.

“Where am I? Who...who are you?”

She smiles. “This is my establishment, sweetie. And my name is Fish.”

++

It’s been more than twenty four hours, and Harvey didn’t think he could be any more scared than he is, but every time the phone goes, every time the captain comes near his desk, every time somebody male, blond and five eight gets pulled out of the river, or dragged from the sewer, or turns up in a trunk in The Narrows…

It’s been a no so far, every freaking body he’s had to look at, a lot and too many for a single day, but the next time he knows the odds are better that it’ll be Jim and he isn’t sure his heart will take it.

No. It’ll take it. He’ll make sure it does because he isn’t checking out until he finds the bastard who did it.

Everybody tries to tell him, dumbasses, that it’ll be okay. Jim’s out there, somewhere, and alive, and they’ll find him and they’ll bring him home. Hell, it’s not even soon enough for a missing person’s report, officially, so there’s still time for Jim to wander in with probably some wild explanation for not calling in, not having been home, his car turning up abandoned in a part of town the frigging army would go around rather than through.

They can’t look him in the eyes when they say it and he doesn’t know if they think he’s stupid or they just are.

He hasn’t given Jim up for dead, because he won’t, but all the same…

He’s been a cop for a long time and lived in this shithole of a city longer than that.

He knows just how rare happy endings are around here.

But he keeps looking anyway because whether it’s alive or not, Harvey is going to find his Boy Scout if he has to turn the entire city upside down to do it.

++

It’s a tip off, and Harvey can smell Oswald’s stink all over it. For the first day, he’d been sure it was Oswald, that he’d finally taken this weirdo fucking obsession he’s got with Jim beyond creepy to illegal and decided just to take him.

But while he doesn’t doubt for a moment Oswald wouldn’t knock Jim back if he suddenly lost all his senses and wanted a danger fuck, he also knows that Oswald wouldn’t actually hurt him.

It makes no damn sense, but when Oswald drops by, to assure them that he too is looking for Jim, and had no part in his disappearance, Harvey believes him.

Until somebody phones in where they claim Jim is, and Harvey thinks Oswald might be above snatching Jim, but he wouldn’t be above using him to SWAT his old boss, his one time mama. 

Which is why he doesn’t tell anybody, because he’s not playing that game. And if Oswald’s right, and Jim is there…

It’s going to take more than twelve guys in body armour with carbines to get him out, and if the cowboys go in, Harvey’s pretty sure his partner will be dead this time, it will be his body, death by GCPD.

He grabs his hat and coat, and heads down to the car.

++

It’s a nice room, he figures. It’s where the doctor comes to see him; his hands shake and his breath stinks of bourbon, but he’s gentle and kind and he tells him he has a slight concussion, and his memory will come back eventually.

He tells Fish she can give him some painkillers if his ribs hurt too bad, and ice them if that doesn’t help, but other than that…

He’ll be okay.

He wishes he could believe it. For the first day, day and a half, he has a fever, and Fish comes by sometimes, and puts a cold cloth on his forehead, and encourages some pills out of an orange bottle into him. 

He feels better and he feels worse, but it passes, and the next time his head is clear, he gets up because he needs to piss and finds the door locked.

Fish comes to see him later, and she explains that the people who hurt him could be out there and she wants to keep him safe.

Besides, it’s risky for him to be wandering around in his condition, not better yet, not fully, and still not knowing who he is or who he can trust.

Except for her, of course. He can trust her.

And it’s later still, while she sits there and watches him eat, that she wonders if maybe he’d like to help her out around the place a little. Everybody pulls their weight around there, and he swallows guiltily and asks what it is she wants him to do.

++

Butch looks shifty as fuck the minute Harvey comes in, and Harvey wonders when the big guy’s poker face wore thin.

“Little bird tells me you’ve got my guy here,” Harvey says.

Butch scoffs, but Harvey leans in close, mouth next to Butch’s ear.

“We both know Falcone hasn’t put out the word on him,” he says. “So if he’s here, your boss better have a bag packed and a fake passport, or be ready to make a move, you know?”

Butch shrugs, but he’s not as daring as Fish, not as blinded by envy and greed.

He might be trying to play it off, but he knows what Falcone would do if he gets wind of Fish crossing the line where Jim’s concerned.

“So I’m gonna take a look around,” Harvey says. “And if I find him here…”

Butch pushes his stool back from the bar.

“Lemme save your shoe leather,” he says. “Just don’t shoot anybody.”

Nothing makes him more likely to go for his gun than somebody telling him not to shoot somebody when they’re discussing what the fuck has happened to his partner.

++

The guy gives him bad vibes the minute he comes in the room; he hates it even more when he locks the door behind him.

“Fish said you need trained up, said I should show you the ropes.”

He’d stood up the minute the guy came in, out of manners, he guessed, but now he’s glad he did. 

Doesn’t feel like he wants to be sitting on his bed with this stranger near him.

“She said...when she said help out, I thought maybe at the bar, or on the door.” Because he can see in the guy’s eyes, the way he’s dressed, the way he holds himself, just what ropes he’s about to be shown.

The guy smiles, but it’s a veneer. “I think she had something else in mind. More of a host...role. You know, welcoming people in, making guests feel special.”

Somehow, he gets the feeling they have different ideas of how to do that.

He might not have his memory, but he’s not an idiot.

“I want to talk to Fish.”

The guy sighs. “Look, fella...If I have to go out there and tell her you’re not willing to play ball…. It’s gonna be bad for both of us, you know? No need to get tense over it. I can show you what you need to do.”

He slips in close, too close, and then…

It’s done nearly without him having to think about it, his hand finding the guy’s wrist, pushing it backwards and using the leverage to put the guy on his knees.

“Fuck,” the guy almost squeals, and then the door swings open and he’s turning, because if this is what their game is, then even if he doesn’t know his name, he knows he won’t be brought down cheaply, without cost.

There’s two guys standing there. One of them is Butch, but the other….

The other…

“Jim,” he says, and he sounds so relieved, and in the same instant so furious at what he’s seeing, that everything kind of clicks into place so hard it nearly hurts.

“Harvey?”

“I should shoot the fucking pair of you,” Harvey says, and then he’s grabbing Jim’s wrist, and tugging him away from the guy on his knees, and out of the room. 

++

Leslie looks him over, Harvey hovering; she tries once to get him to leave, but then gives up.

Jim doesn’t mind him being there. It’s, to quote the song, all coming back to him now; the mugging when he was following up a lead, one Harvey tells him he was an idiot for doing alone, and wondering, dazed, everything mixed up in his head, and seeing Fish’s place and something about it being the only thing familiar to him.

So there he went, and he still can’t believe what she had planned for him.

“What the fuck else could she do,” Harvey says, but he still sounds like he wants to go back with a shot gun and and up Fish’s operating expenses for the month. “Couldn’t off you. But she’s too twisted to let things go.”

“And when your memory inevitably came back?” Lee’s closing up her bag; she rests her hand on his shoulder.

Jim shrugs. He doesn’t know. Not kill him; probably laugh in his face because he couldn’t kill her either, and who was going to back up his testimony that she'd essentially kept him prisoner for days, weeks, however long it took for him to remember who he was?

More than likely, her people would spin a story of a dirty cop, moonlighting as a...host.

He doesn’t tell himself the lie that it doesn’t matter. It does, another mark against her, and her boss Falcone, against the puppet masters and the people in the shadows, the ones who can empty a squad room just by the mention of their name.

It just can’t matter right now because right now there’s nothing he can do about it.

Lee makes it clear he can’t be alone, just for twenty four hours, until he’s fully over it, and Jim doesn’t argue. He lets Harvey help him get dressed again, guides him out of the medical room at the precinct, and to the car.

Settles down in Harvey’s spare room, knowing his partner is probably sitting up in the living room with his gun on the table, just in case Fish decides to be bitter and stupid for once.

She won’t, he’s pretty sure, but he does sleep better knowing he has someone he can trust watching over him, keeping him safe.


End file.
